The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.
Most of this episode is a verbal confrontation between Neko and Osoto, the required summation for any solid mystery story, in which our brilliant detective lays out the facts of the case. Unlike most summations, the case is, in a sense, still in progress.
So, challenged to relate what she knows of Osoto and solve his mystery, Neko (outside the Hotel, in the twilight wasteland) relates this much about Osoto. His targets are for multiple reasons, as Osoto himself more or less said earlier in the show. Some, such as the women in the first folio that was found, were kills for pleasure while others, such as those related in the secret diary in the previous episode, were done for a feeling of power, as indicated by Osoto having ranked most of them according to the status of the victim.
His reason, then, stems from a low self-esteem, linked to his parents. Osoto goes ahead and supplies that though he studied hard and won success that way, he was basically the “normal” child of geniuses, who never praised him and in fact seemed to be ashamed of him. This ties into the one special kill in the book, Atori. Atori, though a person not of any particularly great status, was someone his parents respected and even doted on, frankly treating him better than they did their own son. Atori himself was very humble about it, but when given a basically free opportunity to shove Atori in front of a late night train, Osoto took it – much to his regret.
This reveals the final challenge, what does Osoto want and what is he planning to do. Neko, despite running out of patience for guessing games, puts it together. Since Osoto is alive in the real world, or so he’s realized, he can’t be planning to simply take Atori down with him, since he has a life to go back to and, well, just killing Atori didn’t work out too well for him the first time. Thus Neko hits on the preposterous idea that Osoto in some way intends to consume Atori, to absorb and become him and return to life with that as part of him. No clear mechanism is given for how Osoto plans to achieve this, but it is his goal since he makes some great psycho faces praising her for how she understands him better than any friend, family, or lover has before.
Neko’s had enough, and pulls out the plot trinket that monkey dude let her in on: A handgun stolen from the Manager’s office that according to the monkey dude is a magic “send people to Hell” gun.
Meanwhile, Atori and Ruri have been searching for Neko, and find her by looking out from the balcony, right about as the gun comes into play.
Atori, Ruri, Manager, and Monkey dude all rush out of the Hotel while Neko confronts Osoto. Neko, being a pretty reasonable girl, hesitates to pull the trigger despite her resolve, which lets Osoto get the drop and beat the tar out of her, seizing the gun for himself. He puts a shot into the dirt next to Neko’s head, and it appears that the Hell gun operates much like a normal gun.
This is when Atori shows up to spring on and wrestle with Osoto. They struggle over the gun, and in the scuffle, Osoto gets shot in the abdomen.
It’s just a normal gun. Everyone panics, but as the monkey dude confirms that he lied, Osoto expires, and the gate of Hell opens for Atori, even as Neko screams that she’s the one responsible. Atori is taken away, asking Neko to live on for him and recounting that she seems to have a legendarily strong will, since her face was always her own.
Manager forcibly brings Neko and Ruri back to the Hotel, monkey dude gets super excited about being able to gaze into the pit of Hell as it takes Atori, and Neko is told she’s fired.
At this point we have one more episode to, if the normal principles of storytelling mean much for this one, reach something resembling a positive conclusion. It’s not required that all stories have happy endings, but when this is episode 11 with no real cool-down time, I think the story has more to do, and if its genre and tropes so far hold out (which one can normally expect) and least a majority of the clues are probably already on the table.
In my mind the two most important are Neko’s incredible willpower (highlighted as it was at the end of this episode), and the fact that it was mentioned in an otherwise out of place conversation that hotel workers are paid, just in time (somehow) rather than in material goods – a fact that had Ruri (real life scenario: vegetative state) saving up but that otherwise was introduced fairly arbitrarily and that hasn’t been used. I presume a fired Neko still gets severance pay. There are likely a few more ingredients needed to brew up the final episode, something between the timeline of events, the mysteries of the Hotel’s limbo, the monkey dude, and so on that together will form our last solution. But, we’ll see exactly how that falls out next week.